White Walls

A memoir of mothers and daughters, hoarding, and healing.

Judy Batalion grew up in a house filled with endless piles of junk and layers of crumbs and dust; suffocated by tuna fish cans, old papers and magazines, swivel chairs, tea bags, clocks, cameras, printers, VHS tapes, ballpoint pens…obsessively gathered and stored by her hoarder mother. The first chance she had, she escaped the clutter to create a new identity—one made of order, regimen, and clean white walls. Until, one day, she found herself enmeshed in life’s biggest chaos: motherhood.

Confronted with the daunting task of raising a daughter after her own dysfunctional childhood, Judy reflected on not only her own upbringing but the lives of her mother and grandmother, Jewish Polish immigrants who had escaped the Holocaust. What she discovered astonished her. The women in her family, despite their differences, were even more closely connected than she ever knew—from her grandmother Zelda to her daughter of the same name. And, despite the hardships of her own mother-daughter relationship, it was that bond that was slowly healing her old wounds.

Told with heartbreaking honesty and humor, this is Judy’s poignant account of her trials negotiating the messiness of motherhood and the indelible marks that mothers and daughters make on each other’s lives.“A beautiful memoir…[It] tells the story of mother-daughter relationships in a way that is fresh, honest, sad, and funny all at the same time.”—Bustle
 
“A ‘Mom Must-Read.”—Parents
 
“Batalion is a talented writer who balances the ups and downs, shares humor and heartbreak. Her sentences are beautiful: sometimes emotional, sometimes making you laugh out loud.”—Mayim Bialik on GrokNation.com (inaugural book club pick)
 
“Told in a style that is anxiously charming, Batalion’s memoir asks what it means to love both our parents and to be free from their wreckage.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“Beautifully written…White Walls is a sophisticated, daring take on the effects of the Holocaust, and Batalion represents an important voice on contemporary Jewish identity.”—The Jerusalem Post
 
“A gorgeously textured, beautifully crafted book that touches the heart, tenderly, with laughter and with wonder, even as it reminds us of the strange, unyielding, often magical force of family in our lives.”—Jay Neugeboren, author of Imagining Robert and Transforming Madness
 
“Honest, difficult, and perfect. Batalion’s sharp wit and hard-earned wisdom provide the reader with hope that we can all somehow find it in ourselves to embrace the inevitable chaos and change that comes with living an imperfect  life.”—Nicole Knepper, LCPC, author of Moms Who Drink and Swear
 
“Sharp, quick, funny, but the kind of funny that sometimes has you feeling kicked in the stomach and teary with the delight of recognition…Part Nora Ephron, part Woody Allen.”—Honor Moore, author of The Bishop’s Daughter
 
“This is a modern woman’s look at how we construct who we are—both through conscious, painstaking effort, as well as through acknowledging and embracing the comforting, familiar, and routine flows of our family histories.”—Library JournalJudy Batalion grew up in Montreal. She studied at Harvard before moving to London, where she worked as a curator by day and a comedian by night. She now lives with her husband and daughters in New York.

Praise

Title Page

Copyright

Disclaimer

Dedication

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

1ST TRIMESTER:

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

2ND TRIMESTER:

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

3RD TRIMESTER:

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

4TH TRIMESTER:

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

EPILOGUE

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Names, dates, and identifying characteristics of certain people and events portrayed in this book have been obscured for literary cohesion, to protect privacy, and to make myself seem younger and thinner.

• PROLOGUE •

VOYAGEUR

New York City, 2010

“It’s time,” my father’s voice creaks through the phone. My father has called me exactly three times since I left home, in 1996, and never at eight thirty in the morning.

“Her threats are serious. She’s really planning it,” he says. “The details.”

He doesn’t make any of his usual jokes: she is plotting her plot for when she plotzes. Or: she’s ready for her seventy-two virgins. That’s how I know it really is time.

I feel my esophagus battering through me like a pendulum. “I’m coming.”

I dial my brother. “Eli, book us in at court for tomorrow morning,” I say, as if I’m referring to a mani-pedi, and not requesting an injunction against the woman who bore me.

I hear my blood pump, quick, staccato; imagine hers gushing through her thick veins. Imagine it stop. She just likes the attention, I remind myself, attempt to console myself. Eight hours from New York to Montreal. I can make it. I must.

I look out of my all-window apartment at the new high rises and old water towers, at the buzzing Mondrian grid of Manhattan streets. I see their arrangement: parallels and perpendiculars, squares, equal angles. They are numbered in order, so no one ever gets lost. Someone is looking out for you. I live on the eighteenth floor, reminding me of chai. The Hebrew for one and eight, the symbol for luck. The word for life. I am on top of things here on my mountain—I can see the moat, protect myself.

“What’s going on?” Jon, suited up for work, comes into the living room, which is sparse, airy, barely furnished. The exact opposite of both of our mothers’ homes.

“I’m going to get the court order,” I say. “Finally.”

“Finally,” he repeats, knowing that I’ve been trying to do this, waiting for my dad’s support for years. I smell his Irish Spring. Like the Irish are so known for cleanliness, he jokes in his British accent. To me, it’s the scent of savior. “Call me.”

“If you’re lucky.” I grab his hand. He squeezes back. I memorize the pressure of his knuckles on my skin, think how our bodies’ link is entirely different from the bonds that hold together DNA.

I am wired. It’s actually happening. I have only twenty-five minutes to catch the bus. Within ten, I am packed and in a taxi headed to Port Authority station.

I call Mom as we stop and start in the traffic around Times Square. “What’s going on?” My stomach is clenched.

“I can’t go on. They’re coming to get me,” she says. She is terrified of them. “There’s no point. Even God is telling me to kill myself.”

“Well, God’s made a lot of mistakes,” I say, but God? When has she ever once mentioned God? I try to breathe, feel the pulse in my eyes. Eight hours is a long time. “I’m coming,” I say, as we pass a billboard for yet another Shrek. “Don’t kill yourself.” It’s very simple: just don’t kill yourself. The concept of her nonexistence short-circuits my neurons. The area behind my forehead goes numb. “I’ll be there soon,” I add as the cab jerks to a halt. The need to check in with her became worse over the past few years. Sometimes she doesn’t call back for hours. Usually, she’s just on Valium, or engaged in her fantasies, or deeply ensconced in Masterpiece Theatre. Thanks, PBS, for your riveting programming that has aged me ten years.

I hop on the bus, clutching a southwestern tuna wrap from Au Bon Pain. The difference in my two lives has never been more apparent. Within a quarter of an hour I go from an aerial condo to Greyhound. Sashimi to sandwich. My chosen family to my birth one, and accordingly, I revert.

I find an empty seat. I know this route well. “Voyageur” is the Canadian branch of Greyhound. Meaning “traveler,” its rolling French connotes wild adventure, Jules Verneish explorations, sing-along expeditions across the Yukon’s blazing horizon, instead of the reality: the alcoholic luggage schlepper, the characters who travel back and forth with plastic bags instead of suitcases, and the racist customs officials who interrogate them. Seeing my Canadian passport, their main question is: did you buy anything? Well, I always want to answer, considering I’ve been away for fifteen years, I have done a touch of light shopping.

I text my friend Melissa, who I’m supposed to meet for lunch later that day, a mini celebration for my thirty-third birthday. “Heading to Montreal,” I explain. “Just a little impromptu vacay.” To prevent my mother from hanging herself with her vast collection of pencil cases.

I check in with Mom. Still alive.

I e-mail my brother: “you’re on call when I lose reception in the Adirondacks.” I’m thankful he’s on the ground, can pacify her with his soft voice, his slow gestures, until I get there. He soothes her more than I do. She likes him better.

Then, I take out a pen and the forms that have been sitting in my drawer. I need to fill in the blanks, and to do it perfectly. For years, I’ve tried to find ways to get my mother into treatment, secretly speaking to social workers, doctors, therapists, driven by the image of her cured: smiling, laughing like she used to, maybe even leaving her house, coming to mine. I’ve done more research for this project than for my PhD. Then again, my mother is much more complicated than Representations of Domestic Space in Contemporary Art. You won’t have a good chance at court unless your father participates, they all warned. He’s the one who lives with her. Enables her, they meant.

Only now, staring at the legal questionnaire and the “patient’s history,” I’m not sure where to begin. How to narrate the tale of my mother falling apart? The brain that turned in on itself over decades, in little unremarkable steps, like the ascent of the Nazis, I think, and wonder if I should start with the Holocaust. My grandmother’s escape from Warsaw to Siberian work camps, my mother’s wartime birth in Kirgizia, in transit, her formative years in ravaged Poland, DP camps, born into the fresh smell of a murdered family, a refugee before she knew what home was. Eventually coming to Canada, but never really settling, never committing to a house, a stable structure. The way a few extra piles of books turned into domestic mayhem, mounds of old paper towels, thousands of videocassettes, stale Danishes that formed a barricade across her kitchen, a fortress to protect from the next world war that was always just around the corner, especially in suburban Canada. The slow stewings of a victim complex. The disputes, the real estate battles, tens of thousands spent on lawyers, not to mention the rooms filled with spy devices used to record every meeting, the gradual disjoining from friends, cousins, siblings, her own name. The stacks of “research” to help her track down “the people who are after her,” who—she claims—break into the house, leave her cryptic messages, mess up her papers. The house bolted stiff with locks and alarms, loudly ticking clocks in every room. Cameras. Laptops. Binders. The pill vials. The story of how a person becomes a shadow.

I read the next question on the form. “Is she a danger to herself or to others?” They mean life danger, the social worker had explained.

“Yes,” I write.

In “family history,” I write that her mother suffered from the same thing. The exact same thing.

We reach Albany’s bus station, our pit stop, the midpoint. Transitional space. Not here, not there, but a halfway house. The cafeteria hosts middle-aged women in miniskirts, and might just double as a brothel. Over the years, I’ve pushed myself into constant motion, moved countries, climates, crossed borders, waded in endless hinterlands. An expert at layovers. In the rancid bathroom, the metal door is shiny but offers no reflection, as if my short body, brown hair, plastic-framed glasses are not really there.

I buy the one remaining bottle of sparkling water—my insides, at least, feel sharp, bubbly. A few months ago, my mother said: you were the normal one born into an abnormal family. I’d felt both vindicated and angry at that truth. Then again, a nerdy, workaholic, insomniac, recovering academic, former stand-up comic—I wondered how many people would call me the normal one. But chez Batalion, I am the metaphor for normal, the simile for the sane.

Please don’t kill yourself. Please.

This time, I’m going to get it right. I’m coming home to save you. I’m coming.

Back on the bus, my cell rings. Mom, still alive. “Where are you?” she barks. “Where?” Definitely still alive. And kicking.

“Four hours away,” I answer and spill fizzy water on my thighs. I sigh: they will be wet for that whole time.

“What good is that?” she wails. “I need you here. I have so many problems, Judy. No one ever does anything for me. It’s like I have no family.”

I bite my tongue until the pain feels good, salty. “I’ll be there soon,” I say. I don’t want to lose her. But blotting my damp lap with napkins, I also think: I am so fucking tired of being the mother.

4 WEEKS: INCONCEIVABLE CONCEPTION

New York City, 2011

I was sitting on an examining table at my local clinic when the Israeli doctor threw open the door and pitched a small object right at me. It hit my arm.

“Photograph this!” he yelled.

“Ouch,” I muttered. I reached over to the other side of the table where the white plastic object landed and picked it up. It was small, and square, and had two lines on it. Thin, parallel lines, was the first thought that ran through my mind, their ends never meeting.

The second thought was: Wait. What?

Wait. Fuck.

“What is this?” I asked, my voice shaky.

“Text the photo to your husband!” he commanded. “You’re having a baby!” A passing-by nurse squealed. I felt my eyes pop. My cheeks deflate. My cilia stand on guard.

“But I’m here for my infertility blood work,” I tried to clarify. This made no sense. Based on a history of abdominal surgeries for colitis, an internal palimpsest of scar tissue, and a family history of early-onset menopause, doctors told me it would take at least two years for me to get pregnant—a time period that I secretly thought of as my safety net. While I liked the concept of one day toasting my union with Jon by going forth and multiplying, my mind shut off at the thought of even burping a baby, let alone raising a child. Let’s at least see what’s wrong with you, Jon had urged. He was ready. So at thirty-three, with a forty-year-old husband suffering from his “biological cock,” and the fear that I was on my last eggs, I had reluctantly stopped the pill just to begin the medical process—which I’d assumed would be very, very long. Especially when I started reading about pregnancy: all those years of birth control, and yet, there was approximately one second per month when you could actually conceive.

“Well, you won’t need that progesterone flush today!” the doctor said, patting me—gently, this time—on the back. “Mazel tov! Aren’t you thrilled? You are thrilled. YOU ARE THRILLED. Text your husband!”

He left the room, which was now spinning. A whirlwind of scales and swabs taunted me. I felt nauseous, and knew it wasn’t the estrogen. I managed to fumble for my iPhone, my fingers trembling as they glazed over numbers. Jon answered right away.

“I’m pregnant,” I said, the words like squares in my hole of a mouth. My insides felt like white noise. Alive and cackling but inaudible at the same time.

“Hold on,” Jon said.

“You’re putting me on hold?!”

“I meant, to my colleague on the other line,” Jon said. “Sheesh, hormones already . . .”

“Aren’t you shocked?”

“No. You went off the pill three weeks ago.”

My damn reasonable husband.

“It’s early days, we shouldn’t get too excited,” I blurted out.

“I’m not too excited,” Jon replied defensively, but I could hear the shimmer in his voice, his British accent hitting unusual crescendos. “Come home right away,” he almost sang, tenor tingling.

Doctor Crazy pranced back into the room, his lips stretching across his tanned visage. “We’ll need a whole new set of blood tests now!”

“I’m shocked,” I declared, to him, to myself. A hard bolus, like a freshly blown metallic balloon, appeared at the center of my throat. What have I done?

“Life happens,” he said.

Quite literally, I thought.

My sweaty thumb and pointer finger gripped the edges of the white square, trying to squeeze the two lines into one—a no, a negative, a singular slit of nothingness.

They didn’t budge.

•   •   •

OUTSIDE, TRAFFIC WENT on as usual. The noon sun still shone. The February wind thumped my cheeks. I stopped to buy a frozen feta cheese bureka. I needed a moment to stall the rest of my life, a calm before the seismic, entropic storm like Wile E. Coyote running in midair before noticing that his feet touched no ground. How could the most incredible news I would ever receive have come to me at the bacteria-infested local clinic that Jon and I referred to as “the petri dish”? I meandered on the wide sidewalks, weaving from building to street, taking swaying steps, feeling my feet slip within my ballet flats and sensed a new state set in, a mood crystallizing in my cells: not despair, but not thrill. More of a weight, a heavy, unsettling blankness. Fear.

My mind flitted to the legend about the foundation of Chelm, the folkloric town of Jewish fools. An angel had been passing over Ukraine with a slew of half-baked babies destined for mothers across the globe, when it tripped and dropped them all in this random spot. Rootless, homeless, these were the lost baby spirits that set up the Slavic city of the idiots. I gulped hard. This could not be a mistake.

But why couldn’t I find the feeling of wanting this that I knew must have been somewhere inside me?

I stepped more quickly, zigzagging along the pavement, cutting off workmen on lunch breaks, women carrying matcha lattes. I was having a baby. I was having a baby. Nebbishy, infertile me. A baby had taken up tenancy in my uterus. My arid uterus.

Minutes later I walked into our new apartment, my perfect space, my decorative and emotional pièce-de-résistance. This abode, our Chelsea loft with enormous windows and open plans, marked the culmination of years of work; it was the manifestation that I had solved my life. I insisted we get all white counters, white sofas, white carpets. Who really needed coffee tables? “Less is too much” was my mantra when it came to space. I would live in a gallery if I could. I’d spent a decade working as a design curator, becoming a Doctor of Domesticity, for just that reason. Finally, I’d met a partner who uncannily understood, who’d helped me to make my own clean rooms. We had moved into our pale palace just four weeks earlier. Now I realized that was the same week that my egg was cooked.

Jon was waiting in the kitchen, smiling with his eyes.

“I’m pregnant,” I repeated. “Two years took three days.”

“Super sperm.” He came over and gave me a firm hug, squeezing my sides.

“Better not cuddle too hard,” I joked, breaking free of his grasp. I needed air. “Let me warm up this bureka.”

“I’ll do it,” Jon offered. I sat down at the kitchen table as he flitted around the pallid counters, unwrapping, turning knobs, cutting, his moves graceful like a Romanian gymnast. I was trying to count months in my head, but kept messing up the numbers.

“I guess we’re due in October? November?”

Jon didn’t reply. He was generally gregarious; I knew his silence meant elation. An extrovert par excellence, it was in moments of true happiness that he turned inward.

“Hello, Jon?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing,” I said. How can you feel so secure? I wanted to scream. So sure? It’s not like your family’s so normal. Who knows what meshuggener, messy offspring our shared acids will sprout! But I kept my cool. I couldn’t disturb his euphoria. I smiled.

He cut open the bureka, showing the cheese filling nestled inside.

I forced myself to swallow three enormous bites in a row, their edges smashing against my trachea, blocking me from uttering the high-pitched sound that had been brewing near my tonsils.

•   •   •

THAT NIGHT, I pulled even more blankets over me than my usual three.

“Good night, mum o’ my child.” Jon gave me a head massage.

For hours, I stared at the white ceiling above me, making sure it stayed far up. Do not collapse, I told my walls, do not.

“Jon,” I finally said, nudging him and adjusting my voice to be louder than his snoring, which he did like a wildebeest with bronchitis. “Jon! Where will we put it?”

“Huh?”

“Where will the baby go?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbled from his pillow. “I guess the office.”

Oh God. My office.

I might have a PhD in the history and theory of physical space, but I did not know how to make room for a baby.

I stared at the ceiling, listening to his nasal expulsions. The TV fuzz feeling set in again, tingling through my eyes, nose, spine. Then it dawned on me: pregnant women weren’t supposed to eat unpasteurized feta cheese. I was screwing up already.

I got out of bed and sat in my white tiled shower until morning.

How could I, who came from such a pathologically messy home, with no blueprint for normalcy, make one? How the hell was I supposed to become a mother?

1ST TRIMESTER:

The Basement

• ONE •

BERMUDA SHORTS TRIANGLE

Montreal, 1986

All I wanted to do was go home.

To be picked up from school by a mom who played doubles at the Hampstead tennis club, stuffed into OshKosh winter couture, and escorted into a luxury-car-pool that would whisk me westward to the airy suburbs with shiny built-ins and lemon-lime scents. To do my homework, watch Video Hits, and eat SpaghettiOs and thinly sliced carrots before being bathed in bubbles and tucked into my pink trundle bed that hosted matching throw pillows with embroidered JUDYS.

Instead, I clutched my red-and-blue coat, procured from the basement of a Lubavitch woman who served as an underground wholesale importer of factory seconds. Thank God I’d found one that looked vaguely Esprit, and that my mother had not been forcing me to wear one of the fifteen fake Howard the Duck T-shirts that she’d sourced at the same time. I made my way to the back of the lobby to wait for Bubbie, my mom’s mom, to pick up me and my brother, Eli. Mondays through Wednesdays she took me to Yiddish drama, dance, or judo. (Despite my being barely four feet tall and the only girl in the class, my father’s philosophy: you must learn how to fall!) Thursdays and Fridays we went to her and Zaidy’s house. A few years earlier they had moved with us to a duplex in the suburbs, but averse to the local quietness, quickly headed back east, in the direction they’d always run, making my father—who had bought a house just to fit them—vow he’d never talk to them again, despite their babysitting services.

In the recesses of the foyer, I did not make eye contact with a single fourth grade classmate, but put my coat on slowly, sleeve by sleeve, conscious of directing my every movement, negotiating the position of each of my limbs, convincing myself that if I couldn’t see anyone, they couldn’t see me either. Being short helped me to shrink out of sight. Eli, playing kick the can with an empty cardboard juice box, was stuffed into a puffy snowsuit and wire-rimmed glasses with enormous lenses that made him look sixty instead of six.

Bubbie was usually late, which was fine with me, for when she did arrive she did so palpably. I saw her approach the glass door, flinging plastic bags full of briskets and at least one of her myriad old leather purses stashed with money and mysterious papers. She cackled with glee when she spotted me. Her back was hunched; the handkerchief wrapped around her head, bright green. Even her name—Zelda—was the epitome of conspicuousness.

I’d made my way to Eli before she even touched the knob.

“Judaleh!” she called, her eyes lighting up.

“We’re coming, Bubbie,” I said, pushing my brother out into the dusk. Even if my classmates had noticed Bubbie, I absolutely did not want them to notice me, leaving school by foot and eastward, toward my grandmother’s cramped house with the original gray carpets from 1957.

Outside, icicles hung from traffic lights. It was too cold to talk, even for Bubbie. This was also fine with me and I walked silently, slightly ahead of her and Eli. I buried my face into my scarf, pretending to myself that we were walking to a doctor’s appointment, or tennis lessons, or our cream-colored Jaguar that just happened to be parked far away.

But once I’d climbed through enough piles of snow and seas of slosh, once we were far enough in the east, deep in the area of 1960s low-rise apartment buildings, Vietnamese corner stores, and street names like “CÔte-des-Neiges” and “Lavoie” instead of the upper crusty “Westmount” and “The Boulevard,” I forced myself to look up. There were neither classmates nor their mothers here. Anyone who could see me was also in the east—we were all the same. Breathing easier, I stepped right into pace with my bubbie and simultaneously slipped into a different genre of fantasy, a historical one. Now, I was foraging through a Siberian work camp, or sneaking across bridges over the frozen Vistula, or running through the blustery Polish countryside, or something else that Bubbie might have done during the war.

“You are Hitler!” Bubbie screamed at a grocer, waking me from my inner world and directing me into a fruit store. “And SS,” she said, gesturing to the Sri Lankan assistant schlepping wet boxes across the slushy floor. She was not the kind of Holocaust survivor who suppressed her memories or pretended it never happened. On a regular basis, I heard how she escaped Warsaw by swimming across a river. And in a truck filled with oranges. And at a convent. And thanks to a Nazi, who, of all things, turned the other way. Her best friend was a Polish woman who had helped save Jews; her other best friend had recently been accused by a livid man at the local shopping center of being in the Warsaw Judenrat. Forty years later, these were still topics of gossip here, in this Yiddish outpost of a Polish shtetl in the middle of French Quebec in an ex-Anglo colony.

“Nazi,” she muttered. “Turned my sister into soap!” I was used to my bubbie’s public explosions, especially in this stretch of fruit stores, one of which she was convinced was owned by Hitler’s cousin who charged double for his apples.

Eli and I waited at least an hour while she haggled with grocers. “For the best eekelech, for you,” she said, flailing a cucumber in my face. I knew she had medication to help her craziness—when she took it. As Dad always said, it was the paranoids who fled and survived, giving rise to paranoid children.

Finally, when she was pleased that she’d selected the best roughage at the best price ever offered in the universe, she stuffed her new wares into her cocoon of bags, amazing me that she could fit more inside. I pulled up my backpack, made sure Eli’s was on tight, and we headed back out, again me pretending that it was 1939, and we’d just stocked up to save our lives.

•   •   •

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, we arrived at Bubbie and Zaidy’s house on Campden Place, the bottom flat of a duplex on a pedestrianized street, its center filled with trees instead of cars. A quiet pocket of the city, unnoticed by passersby. I’d lived on the upstairs floor from ages one to six; back then, our home was cluttered but in a free-spirited, hippie sort of way. My parents hosted drinks nights where they served Breton crackers and peach schnapps on their teak tables, Mom’s raucous laughter trickling through the walls, reaching me as I dozed off in my bed. My early birthday parties, overstuffed with guests, offered buffets of bagels amid the seventies crochet. On weekends, Mom taught me to illustrate puns in little homemade booklets as we sat on shag rugs, listening to folk music and her spirited Socialist-Zionist records. Now, my bubbie’s house hosted faux French regency sofas covered in plastic, golden lamps, and a smattering of photographs and Judaica from Poland, though I was never sure how they’d carried large framed photos and crystal vases when they escaped east to Russian work camps where they ate horse meat, and then after the war when they walked back to Poland via Kirgizia, where my mother was born.

My favorite photos were of Bubbie and Zaidy when they were in their twenties, with their dashing slicked-back Warsaw dos and Bubbie’s striking high cheekbones, like a model for Vogue (Vodjz?). My other favorite photo was my parents’ wedding portrait, which hung in a thick gold frame in the living room, showing my mom as a slender beauty with long dark hair and an innocent smile that graced her cherubic cheeks, my dad as a dashing man in fashionably gigantic 1972 eyewear. No pictures of my parents’ wedding hung in my house. Each time I was here, I took a few minutes to stare at this evidence and imagine what it must have been like when they were young, happy. I wondered what it would take for Mom to look so elegant again.

As Eli and I disrobed, my zaidy, now with only scattered white wisps of hair crowning his barely five-foot-tall body, emerged from his basement hideaway—his makeshift workshop where he busily